Tag: colors

I was reading (as I’m sure many of you do, too) Neil Patel’s blog earlier today when I came across this interesting article about the psychology of choosing a color scheme for your blog or website. I quite like reading articles that go into psychology, because while I doubt they’re applicable to everyone, everywhere, I usually find something of value in them (unless they’re truly terrible).

Most of Neil’s article was very interesting, and I liked spending time thinking about how color schemes affect the way my readers feel when they’re on my site. I don’t want anyone to get distracted by a jarring or stark color scheme and I do sometimes wonder if my black-and-white format is too harsh for my usual content.

I found his take on the “color wheel” (part-way down that article, looks like a flower) and at first I was interested, then I felt I just had to disagree with the “meanings” assigned to color. Purple, for instance was associated with revulsion. It’s my favorite color, so of course, I don’t feel revulsion when I see purple. According to the color wheel Neil had posted, the exact shade of orange which is part of his own branded color scheme, was a color which evoked mixture of vigilance and rage. It just doesn’t add up, does it?
I decided to search for some more interpretations of how color affects people, and I found these:

This one has been done phenomenologically and it’s sounding very authoritative but it has no evidence on which it’s based its conclusions, which appears to be an endemic problem in this topic.

This article from Entrepreneur.com has a good summary of the debates surrounding the psychology of colour and highlights the need for more evidence.
There is no doubt that color plays a huge part in buying behavior in marketing, but no-one seems able to agree on which colors are best to do what.

Personally? I think the most important thing is to use a color scheme that goes together properly. The color blender color matching tool often gives surprising results, but overall I think it works very well. In some instances, the coloring might be obvious (this erotica author’swriting site, for example, is themed monochrome and pink, and it’s easy to tell that it’s a steamy romance author’s site with exciting books) but in other cases, the role of color is ambiguous and complicated.

Different colors mean different things to different people, but we can associate color schemes or sets of colors with the things we know they represent – for example, fire is orange, water is blue, so is sky. If we see those colors, with other associated colors (orange with brown for the logs on the fire or black for coals, and grey for smoke, for example) it will definitely ensure people make links between a brand and a concept or thing.

I have no idea how to apply any of this to Delight and Inspire, but it’s been interesting to research how other people have thought about the psychology of color.
Isn’t color theory fascinating?

Today’s video is how to do UV Glow in the Dark Rainbow Hair and Rainbow Eye Make-Up, and it’s probably the most exciting thing I’ve ever done on camera.

….Scratch that.

It’s definitely the most exciting thing I’ve ever done on camera and then uploaded to Youtube! Stop sniggering at the back, girls (and stop texting in class).

Coming in at around 18 minutes, it shows you how to get the glow in the dark hair trend that’s gone viral on Buzzfeed! I’ve taken it to it’s logical extreme and done it as a rainbow braided effect. The best part? You don’t even need to bleach your hair! Even if your hair is black! Next time I go raving THIS is what I need to look like:

The rainbow glow in the dark UV hair tutorial came out like this.

But that’s not all. It doesn’t take 18 minutes to do some braids, make them rainbow then speed it up for Youtube. What else is in the rainbow glow in the dark UV hair video?

You guessed it, there’s this awesome full rainbow eye tutorial as well! That’s right, it’s a double rainbow!! I have wanted to put this rainbow eye tutorial on Youtube since April 2014 when I first came up with it, it’s actually what prompted me to start my blog in the first place because I wore the rainbow eyeshadow look to a party and literally everyone (even the boys) were asking me how I did it.

And you’ll have to watch the video to see how to do it:

To get the UV glow in the dark hair gel back out of the hair, unfasten the braids, gently comb them out (or unravel with fingers – be prepared to get fluorescent UV gel under finger nails and all over the floor so I did this in the shower cubicle because I hate cleaning) and then wash the UV paint glow gel out of the hair with shampoo. Paint Glow UV Gel is 100% safe,* it contains no radioactive ingredients, the glow is caused from the fact that it’s more reflective of UV light (although technically UV hair gel doesn’t have an SPF)! I used Alberto children’s shampoo followed by plenty of conditioner because this hair tutorial can dry your hair out a bit. It did wash straight out in the shower though. I was very disappointed by the size of the Paint Glow UV Hair Gel tubes but each braid used about a toothpaste-on-toothbrush amount of gel, and next time I’m buying anything for a similar tutorial I will buy the more expensive UV hair dyes that last a week or two instead. The UV hair gel is obviously MUCH better if you have a job and don’t want to turn up fluorescent on Monday after partying all weekend.

*But don’t eat it. C’mon. Moisturizer is safe to wear, and we don’t eat that either.

I purposely designed the hair look to be androgynous so anyone with enough hair can do it. The eye make-up, of course, is down to preference. This would be an AWESOME look for a pride march, a rave or dubstep gig, or any other time you want to show that you love glow in the dark rainbows!

Rainbow eye make up from the front (because what else goes with glow in the dark rainbow hair????) in normal light.Rainbow glow in the dark UV hair and make-up tutorial results: In a UV light AND normal light together.

What do you think? Do you like it? Next week I’m doing a rainbow UV glow in the dark no-shave mohican because I’ve wanted to try a mohican since I was like 6 and saw my stepdad’s mohican (y’all probably call it a mohawk in the United States but we invented punk so I’m not fully translating this one).

I took some Bleach London semi-permanent hair colours, in Blullini and Rose:

I splortched the blullini on one of the front strands of my hair and wrapped it in some tissue and put a clip over the tissue to keep it in place, so I didn’t get blue dye all over me. Then I separated another strand for the other side:

Next I poured out some pink:

I put it on my hair:

And I rubbed it in:

I wrapped that side in tissue and clipped it down as well. Then I waited about 10-15 minutes.

When I washed it out, it looked like this:

After a couple of weeks of trying to wash it out, the pink had totally vanished, without even a reddish tinge or anything, but the blue still looked like this:

Annoyingly, the blue remained for another seven weeks! It’s a shame because it was a beautiful electric blue colour. I was very pleased with the pink result, it was a delightful shade of pastel pink and was really pleasing to see in the mirror, and I used it again before half term to colour the entire bottom half of my hair, tutorial was done on Youtube and can be found here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAfS6MVLVpw

Have you used any semi permanent Bleach London colours? Let me know in the comments.